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1 Introduction San Antonio’s Pedestrian Rhetoric my story begins with my first memory of walking the city. During my senior year of high school, I participated in San Antonio’s Battle of Flowers Parade, one of the central events of the city’s annual Fiesta. Each year, parade organizers sponsor four of the city’s public high schools, providing the float, costumes, and all the decorations. As a class officer in one of these selected schools, I could ride in this prominent city spectacle. Some of my friends, who were members of the school band, marched in the parade everyyear,butthiswasmysoleopportunity.TheBattleof FlowersAssociation (BFA) chose the theme and the outfits. This year, they chose musicals, and so my high school float was designed for Oklahoma! A few months before the parade, I was fitted for a “pioneer” dress—a long, yellow skirt, puffy shirt, and a big, white bonnet. I walked alongside the float in my frumpy outfit, chosen to be one of the hardy pioneer children, while my taller friends rode in a mock wagon above heaps of plastic yellow flowers. I was thrilled to be in the parade. The day of the Battle of Flowers was an annual, citywide holiday, so I knew most of my friends and family would be in the stands. We arrived at the preparation area several hours before the start at eleven in the morning, and I spent this time watching hundreds of costumed people preparing. Band members tuned their instruments. Horses were fed. Cars were decorated with wreaths and flowers. Giant floats emerged introduction 2 from trucks and warehouses and traveled to their designated spots. When we finally began to process down the parade route, I started my first “long poem of walking” through downtown San Antonio, spatializing the city with my footsteps.1 As I continued in the parade, I traveled south on Broadway, passing by the four-dollar seats and families with coolers on the back of their flatbed trucks, with lawn chairs and legs pushed into the free spaces in between. Young kids stood in the front rows, tossing confetti and blowing whistles. I then passed the large bleachers and the main reviewing stand, directly in front of the Alamo. We paused in front of the judges, smiled, and then traveled past denser crowds, over the river, past Joske’s Department store, the Menger Hotel, and Frost Bank, with small crowds watching from their balconies. We turned west onto Commerce Street, and then north onto Santa Rosa Street, and finished before we hit the highway. I waved for more than two hours. Like the participants in hundreds of other urban parades, I had a brief chance to perform in the middle of a citywide audience. I enjoyed the opportunity of “going public”—momentarily becoming the center of attention. As a young child, I sat in those same flatbed trucks, eating snow cones and watching bands, mayors, police officers, and festival queens pass by. Through the act of “passing by” myself, the myriad glances, waves, and hellos were my “pedestrian enunciations.”2 My entry into the center of San Antonio’s public culture was an act of weaving buildings, people, and streets together, and acting the space of the street as a speaker acts through language.3 Within the limitations of a particular spatial and social order—the boundaries of the route and the context of the parade—I could establish my own relationships with other participants and people who shared this space. Every year, hundreds of San Antonians take their own footsteps in this parade, forming relationships on this public stage and enacting the social forces of the city.4 In this spectacle, social actors both create and challenge boundaries, and social contradictions become clear. This parade is a framed event, set aside from the daily traffic of downtown San Antonio. Yet parade participants also enact the everyday practices of walking the city. This parade is a special circumstance, a distinct opportunity for public visibility, but those who walk its path also speak the pedestrian rhetoric of the city. In the years since my brief role in the parade, I have come to a new understanding of the significance of my performance. Dressed as an Anglo pioneer in a musical version of Manifest Destiny, I participated in a popular narrative of western history. The parade is full of such references, but the most important story it tells is of the modern city itself. The Battle of Flowers Parade...

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